I PICKED her up on my early warning line when she was still a long way out—just a speck on the last of my plastic hills where I watched for the Enemies. I tracked her all the way in, all the long way in as she came, little-girl wanderingly, something cradled in her baby arms. For a moment my mind reeled back and I thought, “It’s just Little Sister come carrying the Littlest Angel up to my door.” Then my thoughts snapped up to NOW as she rattled the gate, and I flicked the weapons button till all of the launchers were directed at my Outer Wall.
“The password! Quickly!” I shouted, and I really hoped she could give the right one. Otherwise I would have to go with the launchers. And it might not be one of the ground-level creeping missiles I had heard Witch had developed in the great laboratories of her plastic valley. It possibly wasn’t a camouflaged walking doll bomb designed to blow me to high skies and all winds. It might be really Little Sister truly having forgotten the secret password.
“Morning-glory-fit-and-fancy,” she lisped, sharp as a little tack, and her big-big eyes I noticed were real, and there was love, I thought, sparkling through. It was a little girl!
“Advance to Gate 10 and be recognized!” Relieved, I flicked the eleventh, outer gate open. She came on through the walls as I thumbed the gates back. “Stand by for decontamination,” I directed, speaking all along over the Big Address, when she stood before the last gate but two, fatty-round in her play spacesuit. She was jigging little-girl joyfully; she was going to see her daddy. But I had to watch. It might be tricks and booby traps. I directed all my inspectors and decontaminators on her as I let her through the last gate but one, tracking her closely with my weapons. When she stood before the last gate I asked her, “Do you have a pass to be here? Did Witch write you out a paper?”
“I slipped off from Witch and hopped on the roll-go road,” she said and giggled. That pleased me. Witch was the wife, living over a dozen plastic hills from me, with, it had been reported from time to time, more than a dozen different plastic men. But it wasn’t just for Witch that I had all the launchers and the Seeing Wall. Witch was only part of my troubles, the very most minor part almost now, things being what they are in the world; she lived in White Witch Valley with her plastic men and we saw each other infrequently indeed. Sometimes at Xmas we would exchange a frozen greeting—“Merry Xmas over there!”—over our multi-viewers; sometimes at Halloween I would send old broomsticks as a token of my love. And once, on a very recent Easter—I could never explain—we found ourselves both outside our walls peering our pocko-scope viewers toward each other’s Strongholds just as the pink sun shot over the ice-like plastic hills. When I looked directly into her glass with my glass and saw the weird blue ball that was her newest eye I aged ten years just thinking, thinking of all the icy people-hatred in the world. And so who could wonder that the walls out there have the pillboxes eight feet thick and the steel men waiting? It is not odd that I fear the creeping missiles, the walking doll bombs and the White Witch rocket’s flash, realizing that all I have to pit against them is constant vigilance and all the weapons I can get. But she had my children—little boy and little girl—long ago in that other world. He has gone over to the side of the plastic men now and works mostly with his space toys . . . and hardly ever sees his daddy. He’s satisfied to be away from me, his daddy.
But as I said, Witch wasn’t the only threat now. I didn’t regard her as even the major threat now. She was a gadfly. The implacable Enemies were somewhere over farther hills, and then there was Time . . . Time trying to get through to my flesh-strips before I could get through to the Ultimate.
“Hello, Little Sister.” The decontaminators had given her a clean bill; the weapons report had indicated that she was clear—RELIABLY as to her person, and a blurred CONDITIONAL was indicated for what she carried. I saw she carried the Littlest Angel so I thought it a reasonable risk—a little girl and her space dolly. I let them through. And now she stood before me, a tiny cherub of three, all flesh and bone and blood, her own, as yet, except her teeth, which were steel. And that was as far as the Rebuilders of Moderan had replaced her as yet, in deference to her years. By the age of twelve, if she lived, she would have all metal limbs, and perhaps, by that time, some of her organs would be plated. (I’m ninety-two and one-half percent metal alloys myself, designed to last forever!) “How are you, Little Sister?”
She lisped, jigging in glee, “I came to live with you, Daddy. I ran away from Witch. You need love!”
“Oh no!” I was taken aback and thoroughly stunned. I rose from my hip-snuggie chair and stood trembling, all my flesh-strips flooding cold sweat. All my metal parts, where they had rebuilt me, clanged and zinged. A little girl living with me! What would it do to my thinking? My work? Wouldn’t she try to follow me into the Atmosphere Room of the Primitive where the walls were stone and bright blood colored . . . ? Wouldn’t she want to know how it was in the White Room of the Innocents when the two tons-heavy black metal balls moved on the chains . . . ? Wouldn’t she wish to be included, embarrassingly, as help when I went to feed my flesh-strips the complicated fluids of the introven? And what if, some capricious day, I not knowing, she wandered alone into the horrors of the Tube of the Million Mirrors where amid awesome flashing desolation I search for my true reflection?
“Little Sister,” I cried, and I held on to all the things I could reach, and I based my knees against two weapons men who stood by me, so that I hardly clanked and zinged at all now, “do you know, Little Sister, what I could do with you with but the press of a finger? Do you know that this is an armed place as well as an armored place, Little Sister? Do you realize that if you were to hold me, or tie me up, I could still throw a sign to one of my automatic weapons men and he would do the right thing to get you? And in the ultimate contingency, Little Sister, if all seemed otherwise at length but really lost, I could say a certain phrase at any one of all these tubes in the ceiling, all these tubes in the sides or the floor, and that would start a chain reaction in a Stronghold I have hidden in a mountain far away from these walls. And all of this would blow up! You wouldn’t win, you see, even then!” I was trembling against the weapons men who stood nearby; for all I tried not to, my hands made a tinkling sound where I held to two steel posts. And the little monster just stood there, a tiny girl in a play spacesuit laughing up at me, two blue eyes of ridicule it seemed, and she was still holding what I could see was the Littlest Angel. “You wouldn’t win, Little Sister!” Sweat from my flesh-strips was falling down to the floor.
“You wouldn’t want me?”
“I couldn’t have you. Don’t try to force me. It would interfere with my deep thinking. I would be entirely a different person with you about. I couldn’t search through to the Ultimate!” I found I was almost screaming.
“I’ll go then. I thought you needed love.”
“Love!!! No, a visit’s fine. Ten minutes or so, since you’re an immediate member of the family, if you didn’t bring anything to hurt me. But love—well, it would be a bother—so unrealistic. And I might forget to watch for the Enemies.”
“I’ll go now!” Her lower lip pouting out indicated that she thought her feelings had been hurt. Or else she was acting. With little girls it’s hard to say.
“I’m glad you could come,” I said. I fear I said it a trifle stiffly. I never could unbend at such times. But since I could see the end of the visit was at hand I found I wasn’t clanking anymore. “Now, if you must go—” I said. “Witch will probably be worried, you know,” I said. “Some other truce time, maybe—come again—”
She left then, out through all the gates, with the weapons tracking her. And I noticed that she kept looking back over her shoulder, but there weren’t any tears in her eyes, and I wondered vaguely why her steel teeth were bared in what seemed to me a little girl’s devilish grin. Then I saw on the floor where she had left the puffed and bulbous space doll, Littlest Angel, and I stooped to take it and rush it to her. When I touched the Littlest Angel both my hands blew off up to the shoulders. And the paw of a giant seemed to lift me and hurl me through ten rooms. Mined! But I wasn’t hurt badly. I recovered in time to see Little Sister riding a roll-go up the last of my plastic hills. When she turned and waved just at the top of the last rise, just windmilled a fat tubular arm of a play spacesuit in my direction before she turned down into the Valley of the Witch, I suppose I should have blasted her with the launchers. For I suppose she was meaning to be waving a last greeting at the place where she thought her daddy was dead. But I didn’t have my arms fixed back yet to press the buttons, and who could say that Little Sister was actually to blame for the mining of the Littlest Angel?
Perhaps it was mostly Witch and that was why the loud bands played and a flurry of flags and victory flares broke out on the air over her valley while I lay on the black stumps of my shoulders, gasping.
And besides, I face other Enemies, bad implacable Enemies whipping their wings through the milky air, watching me from a brown distance. They sharpen horns and claws and teeth full of danger and they shake reptilian tails for the whirring pounce that will end ME! Oh yes! Tomorrow I must stand even closer to my launchers and seek a way to redouble my vigilance on the hills.